


Silent Night

by Hideous_Sun_Demon



Category: Designated Survivor (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief, Memories, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-22 20:09:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17066282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hideous_Sun_Demon/pseuds/Hideous_Sun_Demon
Summary: It’s Christmas Eve when she comes to him.





	Silent Night

It’s Christmas Eve when she comes to him.

It’s happened often enough that Tom wakes up with a dream of her still whispering in his ear, that when he rolls over in bed to find Alex stretched out beside him all he can think to do is curl into her as if no time has passed at all. She’s a blend of shadows, mostly, but Tom is used to filling in the blanks with his memory, making her real again. He runs his fingers through her hair; all moonlight and impossible softness.

“Alex,” he breathes, and she smiles against his lips.

“My love,” she says back. It’s what she used to call him in their quieter moments- it had made him laugh: so cheesy. _My love_ , she says, and she’s holding his quaking body tight their first night at the White House; they’re lying together, skin to skin, in bed; she’s whispering in his ear as they dance at their wedding. _My love. My. Mine. Mine forever_. Tom fingers his wedding band.

 _Til death do us part_. Well, Alex has never been one for following the rules.

Alex’s fingers are laced in his. He can feel her ring as well, metal burning cold against his skin like snow packed against his palms. It’s Christmas, and they’re in their backyard with the kids, having a snowball fight. Penny is only three, and Tom carries her on his shoulders as Alex and Leo pelt him with an onslaught of frigid snow. Tom scores a hit right in the centre of Leo’s forehead; it bursts apart in a puff of white powder that curls into his eyebrows and makes him look like an angry icicle. For a second Tom is worried, but then Leo is laughing, and Penny is laughing, and Alex is laughing. She throws herself back into the bank of snow and her hair haloes around her head, and Penny is squealing that she looks like a snow angel.

Alex is laughing. She’s nestled her head against his chest, humming the tune of a Christmas carol Tom has forgotten the name of. He can’t remember if he’s in their old bedroom or the White House but it doesn’t matter because she’s with him; his snow angel. Her hair is spreading like an avalanche across the pillow, and Tom buries his nose in it. He catches a whiff of that crisp, summery scent that her shampoo always gives it. The name slips through his searching memory like melting ice. He thinks: sunshine.

“You think Penny will like her present?” Alex asks, like it’s just another year. For a second, Tom can’t breathe. Alex had picked the gift out that Christmas- he had been too busy, but even with the investigation pulling her under she’d found the time.

“Y-yeah,” Tom whispers. His face is wet. “She’ll love it.”

After, none of them had been able to stomach the idea of Christmas, and Tom had forgotten all about it. A month later-

( _after, after_ )-

Tom had found the gift, meticulously wrapped with a perfect little bow on the top, in their- his- closet. He’d given it to Penny, and she couldn’t even rip the paper off before she’d started sobbing again.

What has Tom gotten her this year? He can’t quite remember right now, but he does know that he couldn’t stop himself from crying as he wrapped it- messy, with too much tape and crinkling on the edges, but with a perfect little bow on the top.

“There’s something so magical about Christmas, don’t you think?” Alex says. Now, he knows they’re in the Residence bedroom, velvet-dark and warm, with snow falling like ash outside the windows. Tom doesn’t want to be here. He wants them both back in their home, with the woollen throw that always smelt of spilt coffee no matter how many times they washed it, and the curtains with the stain shaped like Arkansas. He remembers these things, but only as vague outlines, not the actual smells and sights. He can’t recall the exact way the sunlight spread patterns across the wall, or the feel of the dent on the fridge. He can’t conjure them in his head. In only two and a half years, he’s already lost so much. How long until he loses the last of her as well?

Everything is going, going, gone. His nose is in Alex’s hair, but he can’t remember the name of her shampoo. It’s all being swallowed up by the shadows of this too-large bed in this too-large room. This place is eating him alive.

“Tom.” Alex is calling him, cradling his head, and he realises he’s crying. “Tom, sweetheart, you’re doing so well.” She kisses his forehead, and he wishes it felt real. He shakes his head, because it isn’t.

“When I wake up,” he says brokenly, “you won’t be there.”

She smiles down at him. Silly man, she was always calling him. “What makes you think you’re asleep?”

There would be a mercy in him going mad, he thinks. He shouldn’t wish for it, but he can’t help himself. If this is all in his mind, then he can preserve it, keep the memories of her like this until he fades away as well; trapped in a snow globe together. If this is a dream, then soon he’ll wake up, and all the rest of her will trickle away as surely as the sunlight and the smell of coffee and her shampoo. Insanity would even be better than a ghost. Ghosts pass on, one day. They find peace.

Tom turns away, blinks tears out of his eyes and watches shadows move over the ceiling. They roam together in a great mass, hungrily. Tom tries to remember what’s real. It’s only a second, he’s sure, that he lies like that, but it may have been hours. When he rolls over again, the space beside him is empty.

“Am I awake?” he asks; a whisper in the dark. Not even the shadows answer him.

Had he ever been asleep? He isn’t sure. His face is dry, but the pillow beneath is damp. Outside the window, snow is still falling silently. Tom watches it, waiting for sleep, waiting for Alex, waiting for something to take away the hole ripping his chest open, and he listens to the sound coming through the crack in the window; the muffled strings of a faraway Christmas carol.


End file.
